Today we rode all day, 70 miles on the Wobegon trail. It is an old railroad track that was cleaned up and paved. No motor vehicles allowed. You can see from the picture that it was very pretty. Went along a lot of lakes and farms. It was nice because we didn’t have to worry about cars and trucks. The only thing that wasn’t perfect today was the wind. We had a 13 to18 mph head wind all morning. You can see in the picture with my coat being blown sideways. We had to pedal like a dog to go 6 or 7 mph. Really made for a long day.  According to the weather report we were supposed to get rained on today, but the thunder storms all seemed to miss us. We get to ride on the trail for about half the day tomorrow and the weather report says 5 mph winds at our backs! Whooooeeeee that will be nice! We are camping at the city park in Sauk Center, Minnesota. Funny name for a town. This morning when we were fighting the wind I was calling the town Suck Center in honor of my motto for the trip adopted from the book on training Navy Seals. “Enjoy the suck”, the suck being when you are gasping for breath, your tongue is hanging out and you keep going. This campground had a shower and it felt so good. I looked in the mirror when I went in to shower and I had salt crystals all over me. I must have sweated a lot. Tomorrow we are going 90 miles, but it should be an easier day if the weatherman is right, hoping so.

Today as we rode along the bike trail there were billions of grasshoppers. They would be on the trail and would fly off right as we got to them. There so many it looked like the parting of the waves, but only it was grasshoppers. There are lots of dead critters along the road. Deer, saw an elk someone had hit, skunks, lots of birds, snakes. Do know what animal is most often dead along the road? Frogs! Lots of dead frogs. Almost all of them are laying on their backs with their legs sticking out sideways. Looks like they are taking a nap. There are so many of them that I can’t help not running over some of them regularly. Do you know what happens when a bicycle tire runs over a deaf frog? It explodes and frog guts fly everywhere and it gets all over my bike. Cleaned it off a couple days ago because it was looking kind of gross.

we are just 20 miles short of 1900 miles which will be half way done for the trip.  We are going to call 2000 the “official half way point for the sake of my next dance and song along the road celebrating making it that far. Hope you don’t miss it. Love you all. Dee